


late afternoon

by sickgirl_mp3



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: F/M, scandal but...... beyonce
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 14:41:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11557314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sickgirl_mp3/pseuds/sickgirl_mp3
Summary: distance makes the heart grow fonder- that's what beyoncé wants to believe, at least.





	1. four

It is Beyoncé’s fourth birthday, and a white woman is in her face, grinning and asking her how old she is.

She scowls. She’s tired, don’t her mother and whoever this woman is understand this? However, she holds up four fingers. Her mother politely asks her to cheer up, and she’s old enough to know that having a healthy fear of her mother is smart, so she stops scowling. Her and her mother are left alone to say their goodbyes.

“Okay, let’s go home now,” Beyoncé says. Whatever kind of birthday outing this is, however unpleasant and irritating, is fine, she guesses, but she’s ready to go back home and eat some more birthday Eggos.

“Beyoncé, you gotta stay here, baby. I’ll be back to pick you up after work, okay? I won’t be long. Make some new friends and have fun, alright? I love you.” her mother tells her, kissing her on the forehead and walks off. Beyoncé stares, waving back when her mother turns around a final time to wave at her.

“Where’s she going?” Beyoncé asks the white woman she was rudely left with as if she didn’t hear her mother explain what’s going on.

“Your mommy has to go to work.”

Beyoncé hands the woman, who she assumes is supposed to be her teacher, her small backpack. “Make her come back, please,” she requests, irritated.

Her eyes scan the room and land on a girl playing with cars, and she decides to plop down next to her.

“What are you doing?” Beyoncé asks as if she can’t see what the girl is doing.

“Playing with cars, duh,” she says, miffed.

“Goodbye.” Beyoncé says, getting up and walking off. She has no time for talk that’s so childish, even if she is four and somewhat childish by her own standards herself. Her search goes on.

She spots a boy, also playing with cars, and stares for a few seconds before she decides that people playing with cars are most likely all rude and not worth her time. She moves on.

“Snack time!” Beyoncé’s teacher rudely singsongs.

Can’t she see that Beyoncé is busy? What’s with all the interruptions?

Beyoncé sits at a table with the other children and eats her animal crackers. She sees a girl next to her bite the heads off of them and she rolls her eyes and eats hers the correct way, which is biting the animals’ legs off and then proceeding to finish the cracker. The same girl bites the head off of another cracker and Beyoncé just has to break her silence.

“Is everything okay at home?” she sounds just like her mother- that is who she got it from.

Beyoncé’s teacher hurriedly announces that snack time is over and teaches them a cleanup song. In Beyoncé’s opinion, it could be better, but after the first few unenthusiastic listens and singalongs, she sings loudest in the class anyway until cleanup is finished. Everyone gets handed coloring sheets, and giant packs of crayons get placed on the tables. Beyoncé stares at the colorless, pristine photo of Snow White and sighs.

The boy she's sat herself next to hasn’t looked up once, and he hasn't touched his animal crackers either. He must feel her staring, because he looks up. The coloring he’d been doing outside of the lines of the fire truck on his paper is tarnished by a single stray mark when he looks at her. She points at the baby pink crayon in his hand.

He nods and hands her the crayon, and she avoids every line on the paper wildly while he looks at her in interest and picks up a blue crayon and hesitantly imitates her.

“Whatcha got there, guys?” their teacher asks, looking at their artwork as she comes to stand over them. “Beyoncé, it looks beautiful. Yours too, Jordan, good job!”

Her and Jordan share an annoyed and quizzical look and then go back to silently coloring.

About a minute passes before Beyoncé feels as if she's obligated to break the silence.

“Hey.”

Jordan jumps and blinks at her.

“Why haven't you eaten your snack?” Beyoncé asks.

Jordan shrugs.

“You don't like talking or something?” Beyoncé pushes. “I think I know what's going on with you.”

Jordan looks as if he wants to know what's going on with him, so she confidently continues.

“My mom tells me about people who are shy, she says that they may seem rude, but really, they just don't know how to talk to people or don't like it. You think that’s you, Jordan?”

Jordan thinks about it and nods.

“You wanna get un-shy?”

Jordan shrugs. “Maybe, Beyoncé,” he says quietly- so quietly that she almost doesn't hear it.

“You can talk!” Beyoncé says, clapping and nodding. “It's already working! You wanna be friends?”

Jordan nods, a half-smile on his face.

“You don't have to be un-shy anymore. Instead I’m gonna ask for a cracker. Thank you in advance.”

Her mother says that. Jordan hands Beyoncé two cookies. They repeat the process every day. Snacks vary.


	2. eight

"I’m older than you so I get the window seat,” Beyoncé states matter-of-factly as she get on the bus with Jordan to be taken to school.

“By four days,” Jordan says quietly from behind her.

The past four years of friendship have allowed her to tune her ears to pick up the sound of Jordan’s voice; now she hears things that are equally as quiet, too, like the ruffle of papers in the buzzing classroom she and Jordan sit in almost all day aside from when they have a field trip or recess, and the drip of the faucet in the bathroom sink at Jordan’s house she hears when she sits in there for entirely too long and wonders why hanging out with him is the only thing she seems to want to do, and the hushed chatter she can hear from the same bathroom while their mothers discuss things she can’t understand yet, like “taxes” and “mortgage.” Beyoncé thinks they should start saying Morgan’s (whoever she is) name right.

“Still older, though!” she says as she sits down. Jordan follows suit, giving her the half-smile he’s had since he was 6.

“My mom says ‘happy birthday,’ Beyoncé,” Jordan tells her, handing her a card with her name written on it in shaky cursive and her favorite color: blue. “I made this for you. Your real gift’s in my backpack.”

“I want the gift now.”

“You gotta wait! Look at the card.”

Beyoncé rolls her eyes and opens her card. There, taking up both sides of the paper he’d messily folded in half, lies a drawing of him and her, but as the two members of Wham!, her favorite musical duo. Beyoncé has a microphone in her hand, little music notes surrounding her head, and Jordan’s behind her on the piano, and he’s wearing his famous little half-smirk.

“I’m Andrew and you’re George, ‘cause I know he’s your favorite,” Jordan explains, pointing at each of them in the drawing as he speaks. “And ‘cause you can sing. I can’t.”

“Sing me ‘Happy Birthday,’” Beyoncé demands cutely.

“I can’t sing,” Jordan refuses, shaking his head.

“Please?”

Jordan sighs and sings a horrible rendition of “Happy Birthday.” Beyoncé rewards him with a hug and a lie about how good he’s done.

Before they part ways after they get off the bus at the end of the day, Jordan digs around in his backpack and hands her a VHS tape. “For my best friend Beyoncé” is written on it in handwriting too neat to be his. Beyoncé hasn’t seen the contents of the tape, but she loves it already.

“Thank you,” Beyoncé says, hugging Jordan as tight as possible. He smells like plain but pure detergent and the pear-scented tangle tamer product he uses that she totally doesn’t know about because she definitely didn’t go through his cabinet while in the bathroom at his house one day. ”I will watch it and call you pronto.” Beyoncé’s mother says that.

Jordan grins. “Go, so you can watch it before you have to go to bed!”

Beyoncé runs home and hurriedly asks her mother to put the tape in the player.

“Tell me about your day first, birthday girl,” her mother says, sitting a glass of root beer flavored cream soda on the coffee table Beyoncé’s taken a seat at because it’s right in front of the television. “And don’t tell your dad I’m giving you this before dinner.”

“WELL, Jordan gave me a card and it’s us as Wham! and you know how much I love Wham! mom and then he said ‘I’m giving you your real gift later’ so I was kinda mad but I moved on and he sang me “Happy Birthday” and I was so happy and at school everyone wished me a happy birthday and I got a cookie and we still did boring ENGLISH like we did last week but it didn’t matter because Jordan helped me and Jordan gave me this tape just now-”

Her mother laughs. “Breathe.” She puts the tape in. Rewinds it. Presses play.

The blue screen in front of her turns into a black, static-y one, and then a familiar backyard that has Jordan standing in the middle of it, looking around and swaying, waiting, tapping his foot.

“Jordan,” his mother says from somewhere out of frame. “Go.”

“Hey, Beyoncé,” he says unsteadily, clearly trying to make sure he doesn’t mess his words up, “if you’re watching this, it’s your birthday, so here’s eight reasons why you’re so cool.”

The video cuts to the pool in the same backyard, and Jordan comes up out of the water noisily. He grins. “Reason number eight-” he looks past the camera as if he’s listening to what someone has to say. “You can swim really fast, faster than me.”

Beyoncé smiles and thinks about all the summers they’ve gone swimming together- four. Jordan used to be able to outswim her, but she’s practiced in the pool in her own backyard enough to beat him out. She takes a sip of her cream soda and wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.

“Reason number seven-” Jordan says, now sitting at his dining room table in a ratty blonde wig, a Sleeping Beauty dress, and his mother’s pearls. Pink lip gloss is smeared on his face and he’s giggling. “You’re good at those beauty contests!” He tries to wave how Beyoncé’s been trained to wave; it’s a terrible, but heartfelt imitation of the wave that’s caused her tears but won her trophies.

Beyoncé giggles and so does her mother.. Their laughs are the same, but Beyoncé’s is goofier because her friend is a comedian.

“Six,” Jordan says, spinning in his mother’s big office chair to look into the camera and show his missing front tooth. “You helped me take that loose tooth out that one time and it didn’t hurt at all.”

Beyoncé remembers. She’d seen someone tie a string to a tooth and tie the other end of the string to a door and then slam it before… she’d seen it on television. She and Jordan were at her house; he said he didn’t want anything to eat because of his tooth. When Beyoncé’s mother went to take a phone call, she worked fast- Jordan was crying. He was terrified that it’d hurt, and Beyoncé had to convince him that the losing of his tooth would be quick and void of any and all feeling. He agreed, and his tooth was out in no time.

It’s one of Beyoncé’s proudest moments.

“Jordan,” his mother says, out of frame once again. “You told me it just fell out-”

The video cuts to a black screen.

“Reason five: You sing good. REAL good.”

A video of Beyoncé singing at one of her pageants plays. Beyoncé cringes at how she sounds, but her mother pats her on the back.

“He's right, you sound AMAZING.”

“Thank you,” Beyoncé says humbly.

“Reason four-” the camera pans from a shot of Jordan scraping food into the trash- Beyoncé knows it's him because of the digital watch on his wrist. He always wears it. Catching him without it on is similar to learning her mother's name- it's not likely to happen. “When we first became friends, you ate all the snacks I hated so I didn't have to.”

She remembers it vividly.

The rest of the video is a blur of laughter that makes her feel like her ribs are gonna snap and reminiscing that she won't realize is gonna become a habit later on.

“Reason one: You’re the best friend I could ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, evereverevereverever ask for. Happy birthday!” and the image of Jordan pulling the string on a confetti popper and grinning play in her head as she lays it on the pillow and sleeps.


	3. twelve

"Stop!” Beyoncé shrieks as Jordan chases her with the crude rubber band shooter she helped him make in their class an hour earlier.

“It's your birthday, I gotta give you twelve,” Jordan says, laughing.

Beyoncé and Jordan are waiting for Beyoncé’s mother to pick them up; they're going to meet the president on Jordan's birthday because he won the opportunity to in a writing contest, and her mom’s letting Jordan stay over for the night since they're both already packed. Her mother's only rule is that when Jordan's in Beyoncé's room, her door stays open, and Jordan sleeps in the guest bedroom.

It's picture day today, and the gel Jordan had put in his hair to slick it down is wearing off, bouncing with him as he runs with Beyoncé. He looks cute, Beyoncé thinks. Very cute. That's all she can describe at the moment when it comes to her feelings for him. She has a feeling the crush she has on him isn't something that'll pass like the crush she had on Johnny Guliano in her P.E. class first semester.

“Leave her alone, it's her birthday!” Beyoncé’s mother says lightheartedly as she pulls up in front of their school.

“Sorry!” Jordan says with a laugh. He races to the car and hops in, leaving the door open for Beyoncé so she can climb in after him.

“Beyoncé’s mom, can you play this?” Jordan says as he fishes a CD out of his backpack.

Beyoncé's mother nods and obliges, and Haddaway’s “What Is Love” makes the speakers thump. Jordan unfurls a piece of paper from who knows where and begins to read.

“B is for ‘best friend,’ and E is for ‘even cooler than our Super NES sessions every weekend.’ Y is for ‘your number one fan is me,’ and O is for our open windows when we need help woth homework. N is for ‘never fighting,’ C is for ‘coolest dude ever,’ and É represents how special you are, because nobody I know could find a word that starts with that letter.”

Beyoncé takes her seatbelt off to give Jordan the hug of a short lifetime. This feels nothing like Johnny.

                      -

“Mr. President, it's an honor to meet you,” Beyoncé says very professionally andsomewhat elegantly, shaking hands with him.

“What's your name?” he says with his easygoing southern drawl that will later, unbeknownst to her, become famous.

“Beyoncé Knowles, sir,” she says proudly.

“Who's your friend over there?” the President asks. He points at Jordan, whose hair is parted and yet again slicked down with gel, his tie fixed by Beyoncé’s mother, digital watch gleaming. He's gazing at his shoes.

He's closing in on himself; Beyoncé quickly thinks of what she should do, and in no time, she has it. She walks to Jordan and places a gentle hand on his back.

“J, this is your time to shine!” she whispers to him. “You think they let just any old dude in here? No way! You're special, special enough to meet the president! He's not gonna make fun of you or anything.”

“Really?” Jordan whispers back. He lifts his head up so he can look at her.

“Yeah, and if he does, I’ll get my dad to beat him up.” Beyoncé gets fussed at by her mother and the secret service for that.

She watches as Jordan holds his head high despite his trembling hands and gives his president a hell of a handshake.

“Sir, my name is Jordan, and I mean this with the utmost respect,” Jordan says, voice wavering slightly, “I think I want to take your place in this office in the future.”

The President laughs. “Son, you stay straight and turn 35- this office is all yours. I’m just keeping the seat warm for ya. How old are you?”

“Today's my 12th birthday, sir.”

President Clinton pats Jordan on the back. “Wanna know somethin’?”

“Of course,” Jordan says, nodding.

“Those 23 years are gonna fly by.”

Jordan grins and then faints. Beyoncé considers her witnessing of possibly the best moment of Jordan's life a late birthday present.


	4. sixteen

Beyoncé's phone rings, pulling her out of her sleep. She feels around for her phone, answering it groggily. “Yeah?”

“Wake up, it's your birthday,” Jordan's voice crackles through her Nokia phone and into her ear. It's cracking, because… puberty (yikes). Beyoncé looks out of her window and sees Jordan waving.

She waves back, grinning. “I’m sixteen, holy s-” She grimaces and whispers. “Holy shit.”

“Feel any different?” Jordan asks, putting his phone down so he can put his shirt on. Beyoncé nods and tries not to stare at him; since he's a sophomore like her now, he’s playing varsity football, so he's been working out more. It's noticeable, and it makes her blush, and she knows exactly why. “I’m trying to put my pants on, don't look.”

“Huh?” Beyoncé asks, snapped back to reality. “Oh.” She turns away.

“Thanks, pervert. You gonna come to my debate tournament on Saturday?” Jordan asks.

Beyoncé laughs and closes her curtains so she can get out of bed and put her jeans on. “‘Course I am, debate captain.” She makes her way to the bathroom to brush her teeth while she listens to Jordan complain about his potential competitors.

“That weirdo creep Sally from the high school a few miles from ours.”

Beyoncé spits and rolls her eyes. “Hate her!”

“Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, get off that phone! It's too early for all of that!” Tina shouts.

Yes, Tina, what a rite of passage.

“Yes ma’am!” Beyoncé says, rolling her eyes and making an exasperated face in the mirror. “Gotta go, Jordan. Talk at the bus stop?”

“You got it.”

Beyoncé hangs up and puts her favorite blouse on. If she moves her arms a mere inch up, her midriff is on display; she feels alive. Maybe, just maybe, Jordan’ll see it too and think she's cool and a little hot. Not easy, but hot and up for cool things like making out in the back of the car she's gonna buy with her percentage of the money from the shows she's been doing on weekends once she gets her license. Cool girl Beyoncé. That's what she's going for; she asks her mother to straighten her hair without the weird ass curl at the end, and they fuss about it, but because it's her birthday, Beyoncé gets what she wants.

She puts some mascara and lip gloss on and meets Jordan at the bus stop.

“If it isn't 16-year-old beauty queen-turned-singer Beyoncé Giselle,” Jordan says, grinning.

Him sayimg her name makes her knees weak.

“Hi,” is all she can say.

“I’ve got a surprise for you at school,” Jordan says excitedly. “You’re gonna love it.”

On the bus ride to school, Jordan and Beyoncé go over Jordan's debate techniques, Beyoncé's vocal techniques, and Jordan's acceptance speech for being voted student body president.

First it's the student body, then it's America.

In a way, Beyoncé has built him with her own two hands; she's inadvertently made him into the best possible version of himself over the years. She thinks that it'd be nice if she could get thanks for that with a kiss at least. She thinks about it so much in her first period class that she almost misses Jordan's voice of the P.A. system.

“Hello, everyone, it's your student president nominee, Jordan, and I wanna say good morning, obviously, but I also wanna wish someone very special a happy birthday. Hit it, Maj.”

“Spice Up Your Life” by the Spice Girls plays over the speakers and Beyoncé blushes. Everyone in the room stares at her.

“Beyoncé Knowles, you’re now sixteen. Thank you for singing at all of our football games, leading the dance team for the second year in a row, and constantly keeping the second spot- right under me- when it comes to class rank. You can't win everything. You are greatly appreciated by this school, its staff, and most importantly, me, your best friend.”

The announcements are over shortly after and Beyoncé is on cloud nine. She's residing on it the entire school day, and when she and Jordan are laying on her bedroom floor that night because a three-day weekend starts the next day, everything feels right.

“You ever think about how the weirdest stuff means the world to people?” Jordan asks as he stares at the same ceiling Beyoncé is staring at.

“Yeah, all the time.”

“Well, I don't know if this is weird, but I made you this for your birthday,” Jordan says, fishing a CD with his organized handwriting on it. “A mixtape. Corny, I know.”

A piece of paper listing the tracks on the CD is taped to the casing.

  
_**ANTHEMS FOR A 16 YR OLD WHO ALREADY HAS THE WORLD** _   
_**(MINUS ENOUGH MIXTAPES)** _

  1. _Rhythm Is A Dancer - SNAP!_
  2. _Danger Zone - Kenny Loggins_
  3. _Edge Of Seventeen - Stevie Nicks_
  4. _I’m Coming Out - Diana Ross_
  5. _Sara Smile - Hall & Oates_
  6. _Song 2 - Blur_
  7. _Moonlight In Vermont - Ahmad Jamal_
  8. _Hey Leroy - Jimmy Castor_
  9. _Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve_
  10. _Don't You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds_



Beyoncé smiles softly, rolling her way right into Jordan's arms. “Thank you.”

She wishes she could be held under different terms, not friendship terms- but she knows she can't always get what she wants.


	5. twenty

Beyoncé has learned a lot of things since becoming an adult, such as the fact that paying your taxes and keeping your friends close are two very important things.

However, she has not learned how to keep up with men who are college football stars by day and presidential hopefuls by night.

“Happy birthday, dear Beyoncé, happy birthday to you!” a crowd of at least 10,000 sing in unison.

Not a single one of those voices includes Jordan’s; when she lays in the cramped bed on her tour bus that night, she listens to her voicemails.

“Happy birthday, kid. Sing your ass off, but don't sing yourself out of a voice to celebrate today with. I miss you, we need to hang out sometime. See you.”

Beyoncé feels pitiful. The smooth sound of his voice, the sincerity, the diplomatic tone he has- it almost makes her forget how hurt she is that despite the fact that the path her life is taking should allow her to treat him like this, things aren't happening that way.

She drinks champagne by herself, thinks about how badly she wants someone that's just a figment of her imagination at this point, a ghost, and rubs one out. Her friends croak out their last sleepy birthday wishes and she goes into a pessimistic downward spiral until she sleeps.


	6. broken connections, resurrections (for you)

Beyoncé’s in the backseat of another SUV going to another event. She’s a tad hungover and she can’t be bothered to remember what even she’s supposed to be doing or where she’s supposed to be doing that at.

 

“So… where are we going?”

 

“Campaign rally for the senator,” her bodyguard reminds her.

 

“Great,” she mumbles. She now gets to be reminded of the reason why she drank the night before. “How long do I have to be there?”

 

“Three hours. They’ll fly by, don’t worry.”

 

Three hours.

 

“Thank you.”

 

Beyoncé distinctly remembers being one of what- three people (?) to encourage and push and believe in Jordan when he knew he wanted to be President, but-

 

“The faster you get out this car and do your thing, the faster time’ll go by.”

 

So, when she gets there, she hops out of the car, smile on her face, and walks into her old high school. The same high school where she’d spent 4 of her last 5 good years with Jordan, the same high school where she watched him make countless speeches, the same high school where she watched Jordan and his girlfriend, who’s now his  _ wife _ , kiss and look like Barbie and Ken before Beyoncé would go to lunch with him and pretend as if she didn’t see it. She surprisingly doesn’t get mobbed on her way to the gym, but that’s because she takes the shortcut that only six people at her school ever knew about. She stops by the bathroom to put a campaign shirt on before she steps into the gym, feeling nostalgia so strong that it makes her want to vomit all over her shoes.

 

Beyoncé can distinctly recall memories of Jordan being the only one between him and her to actually try in gym class, how he’d push her to keep up with him when someone in class acted up and everyone had to run ten laps around the track to be able to go rest. She’d call herself fat and complain, but keep up with him nonetheless, and he’d run backwards so that they could talk while they ran. He’d trip and get trampled, but he never stopped doing it. 

 

A chorus of shocked and excited exclamations of Beyoncé’s name yanks her out of her own head and she waves, posing for pictures and listening to high school-aged kids tell her how much they love her and ask her when her next album is going to come out.

 

“If I told you, that’d ruin the-”

 

Beyoncé hears a laugh she couldn’t forget in a million years- it’s no different from the last time she heard it, which was when she happened to be staying at her mother’s house and he heard him being interviewed for the local news station- and it shakes her to the core. She doesn’t have to question whose it is because her head snaps in the direction of it. 

 

His back is to her; broad shoulders fill out his dress shirt, and he loosens his tie. When his wrist is visible to her, she sees the same gold watch he’s had since they were young. He still talks with his hands, just like her. He’s gotten taller since they last spoke- at least, she thinks he has, she can’t tell- and he’s shifting on his feet from time to time. He still can’t keep still when he’s nervous. Technically she can’t either, but when you’re forced to look presentable for interviews for years, you learn how to fake a lot. 

 

Before she has more time to stare Jordan down she’s being whisked away to sit on the bleachers. A few minutes later, Jordan steps onto the stage of the makeshift stage in the middle of the gym and smiles, waving at the crowd. They’re wilding applauding, calling his name and whistling and waving signs. Jordan gratefully dismisses them, his cheeks reddening. It upsets Beyoncé that she can see it from a mile away. She feels an ache in her chest.

 

“Don’t cheer for me,” Jordan begins when everyone quiets, “do it for yourselves; yes, I’m an upholder of democracy just like you all, but I wouldn’t be here without you. See, I’m only one person. You all decided to band together to make changes for  _ your  _ betterment- one of those changes including electing me as senator, which I’ll be eternally grateful for- and you made it happen.”

 

Beyoncé can’t stop staring. His voice, his facial expressions, his sincerity- it all holds her hostage. He’s beautiful, just like she remembered, and he’s graceful in his speech. He’s elegant, diplomatic, but somehow still down to earth as ever.

 

“If you’re new here or you just don’t know me, I grew up here. I went to the elementary school down the street and attended church in it on Sundays when the original building got torn down, I rode my bike to the middle school. When I got older I came here and groaned at getting yelled at by Coach Smith in this very gym during freshman year and at calculus and statistics,” Jordan admits warmly.

 

All those memories have Beyoncé’s presence omitted from them and it makes the ache in her chest grow. Her version of his life has her deeply intertwined into it, deeply sunken into its marrow; in elementary school they’d be dropped off by Tina while they traded Cheerios and corn flakes in the backseat, in middle school they’d obsess over how they met the president, in high school they gave each other homework answers and mixtapes and motivation to chase their dreams. His own personal story of his life doesn’t include any of that. She can see that he knows so in his eyes, too. He stops whatever he’s saying and looks into the crowd, scans it. Beyoncé holds her breath as if he’s going to see her.

 

His gaze flickers from one person to the next until it lands on her and her heart stops; by the way he looks, he reacted the same way. He spends half a minute staring at her before he blinks, bites the inside of his cheek, and starts speaking again.

 

“You know what I see when I look around this room?” he asks, unable to keep his eyes off of her. “I see a group of people that won’t let anything get in the way of the progress they want to see. I see people who love their community and each other. I see people who can’t wait to see their wildest dreams come into fruition.”

 

He glances to the left and right of the crowd before his eyes settle on Beyoncé again; hers haven’t left him. Ever.

 

“I see people who don’t let a little bit of a wait convince them to give up on the things they need.”


End file.
